Breastfeeding

Disclaimer: Those of you who know me well know that I am very open about breastfeeding. And I know that this topic is not necessarily comfortable for everybody else. So if you don't want to be exposed to the details and terminology of breastfeeding, then skip this entry. It is not for you.

It is with sadness and relief that I wean Emberly. It has been a long road, but worth the journey. I pumped for the last time last Thursday morning.

I started out wanting to properly breastfeed Emberly, since Ansley had always breastfed through the nipple shield and Hailey had gotten breast milk in a bottle. But I ran into the same problem in the hospital that I did with Hailey. It just hurt so bad. I had been more careful this time about proper latching from the very first feeding, but I suppose I am just one of those people that experiences the first two weeks of breastfeeding like a plumbers wrench twisting the nipple. The lactation consultants came a lot and watched and advised and even printed out articles for me. I started pumping half the time to give my nipples a break.

At home Emberly wasn't happy. She would pull away with letdown, and her diapers were very scary. I tried cutting all sorts of things out of my diet. I read a lot of books and online articles, and I attended a few la leche meetings. I learned that I have overactive let down and overactive milk supply. Emberly did not like the force that came with the first few sucks of milk, so she pulled away and wouldn't latch back on. And with over supply, Emberly was getting full on the fore milk and not getting enough hind milk, which meant she was having a lot of diarrhea, gas, and colic. The la leche leader liked my idea of pumping and feeding at night, and then pumping off the overactive letdown and some fore milk during the day and then latching Emberly on to take advantage of nursing with more hind milk.

It was nice to pump at night. I could just get up every four hours and pump, and then hold the bottle out to her while still half way sleeping if I heard her cry. It was a pain to pump and dump an ounce, and then nurse at every single feeding throughout the day. It was a grand production that needed to be choreographed, and kept me home bound because of its complexity. After a few weeks, the pain subsided, and after about six weeks, the let down got better, but Emberly was less and less interested in nursing when she could still remember the ease of bottle feeding from the night before.

So it reached a point, about 3 months, when I had to give one up. I thought about it long and hard before I decided to give up breastfeeding and simply pump and bottle feed. I knew it meant more bottle washing. I knew it meant double time because of pumping time and bottle feeding time. But I also knew I could hand off the baby with a pumped bottle at any time. I was not tethered. I would never get engorged from baby boycotts to the boobie. And I could empty my breasts on my terms and my schedule. That was great freedom to me and worth the hassle of the extra steps necessary. I think the hardest thing to give up, though, was the bonding. There is something very special about looking down at your baby as they nurse. There are all sorts of chemicals involved that help you feel relaxed and loving, and to have those synchronized with the process of getting your baby full is very powerful. I'm grateful I was able to nurse Emberly at least during the day for the time when she was very little. Those memories are very precious to me.

One thing I realized with Hailey is that I cannot cut back on frequency of pumping for a long time. I continued to wake up in the night to pump...twice a night until Emberly was four months, then once a night until she was six months. By the time she was six months old, I had literally four hundred ounces in the freezer. I had to cut out my last night time pumping because there was simply no other place to put the extra milk. And I am glad I waited until six months. That is when babies really start thinking about eating food, and can handle a drop in milk. Because when I cut out that night time pumping, my supply dramatically dropped from overproduction to underproduction, and I started using the milk in the freezer to supplement, about a bottle a day...and that was in addition to rice cereal. With Hailey, I didn't have a freezer full of milk, so by 8 months, I had to start supplementing with formula in order to have enough.

Two weeks before her birthday, I cut back to one pumping a day. That was the beginning of the end. And it certainly felt like the Apocalypse, at least to my hormones. You would think they had never made this transition before. With Ansley and Hailey, my body performed the change seamlessly. With Emberly, it was like driving a car with the transmission going out. Each gear change was a huge jolt, and it would die at stop signs. I had acne for six weeks, hormonal crying fits, daily bouts of heart arrhythmia's, six pounds of weight loss, unsteady hands, nausea, and several other unmentionable side effects.

Last weekend, when I went more than 48 hours without pumping, I finally started to feel my skin clear up. I could finally use conditioner in my hair again.

Emberly warmed up to cows milk at the last minute. Actually it was about three weeks ago, but that was too close of a call for me. She loves cheese sticks and yogurt, but I don't think she could handle 16 ounces of those two things daily. I still have about 30 ounces in the freezer, which I also consider a very close call.

So now I am relieved. Relieved to give up the pumping and scheduling of pumping, and the responsibility of pumping. Relieved to give up the bottle washing and the dry hands you get from washing bottles several times a day. Relieved to get my body back. Maybe it will be easier to lose those last ten pounds.

And I am sad. Sad that Emberly is not a little baby anymore. Sad that I don't feed her from myself. Sad that a chapter has closed that part of me loved.

There is a time and a season for everything in our lives. I have a hard time living for the moment with a lot of things in my life, but I think breastfeeding, even with a pump, was something that I loved in the moment and enjoyed as I experienced it.